Add to the list of fears being deployed by Republicans this one: racially-charged fear.

With the congressional elections two weeks away - and all the publicly available polling data still pointing in the wrong direction for President Bush's party - the Republicans have unleashed the fear furies. The only puzzle is why they waited so long. Late last week, the Republicans released an ad that showed video of Osama bin Laden as the sound of a ticking time bomb turned into the sound of a beating heart. "These are the stakes," the ad said, suggesting that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for self-annihilation. Then the party started airing an ad that claimed the Democrats would raise taxes - including taxes on working-class Americans - by $2.4 trillion. There is no Democratic proposal to do such a thing.

Surrendering to al-Qaeda, taxing the nation into ruin - there's nothing new about these GOP accusations. But the Republicans are pushing further. They're playing the race card. As the Democrats edge closer to gaining control of the House and/or the Senate, Republican leaders are attempting to thwart any such takeover by pointing out that Democrats - liberal Democrats - will take over several of the most important House committees. These new committee chairs, the argument goes, will viciously attack the White House by launching investigation after investigation of the Bush administration and even consider bringing impeachment charges against the president.

An impeachment effort is highly unlikely. Representative Nancy Pelosi, who would become Speaker of the House should the Democrats win, has essentially ruled out impeachment. Still, Republicans continue to demonize the possible new committee chairs, and they are focusing on those Democrats who are black. As Mary Matalin, a key Republican strategist (who used to work for the vice-president, Dick Cheney) told The Washington Post recently:

A thing we could do, have time to do and will do in the remaining time will be to hammer home what a Pelosi-Rangel-Conyers House would really mean ... That hasn't reached penetration levels yet.

The day that quote appeared in the paper, a veteran (and non-ideological) political reporter in Washington asked me: "Do you think it was a coincidence that she only mentioned a woman and two black men?"

Matalin was referring to Representative Charlie Rangel, the senior Democrat on the House committee in charge of writing tax bills, and John Conyers, the top Democrat on the committee overseeing the judiciary. I know Matalin; she is married to Democratic consultant James Carville. (Don't ask.) And I'm not suggesting she's steering the GOP into a race-based strategy. But other Republicans, too, have zeroed in on Rangel and Conyers, often neglecting to mention those (white) Democrats who would take over other committees. Is there a race-tinged script or just happenstance?

And in Tennessee, where Representative Harold Ford Jr, an African-American Democrat, is threatening to take a Senate seat from the Republicans, the Republican National Committee aired a commercial that accused Ford of accepting campaign contributions from pornographers and that showed a scantily-clad blonde who claimed to have met Ford at a Playboy party winking and saying, "Harold, call me." The woman was white and the ad suggested that Ford had a thing going with her. Produced for use in a southern and conservative state, the ad could be seen as an attempt to exploit the old racist fear among whites that black men lust after their women. Even Ford's opponent denounced the spot and asked the Republican party to stop using it. By the way, another Republican ad accused a Democratic candidate for an open House seat in upstate New York of calling a phone sex line from a hotel and charging it to taxpayers. But the candidate, a local district attorney, had a reasonable explanation: an aide merely had misdialled the toll-free number of a state criminal justice services office-a number that indeed was similar to the sex line number - and the phone bill shows that the aide had been on the sex line for less than a minute. Once again, the local Republican candidate denounced the commercial. Yet the Republican congressional campaign committee stood by the ad, calling it "totally true".

Fear and sleaze. Will any of this work for the getting-desperate-by-the-day Republicans? And is more on the way? Indeed, the stakes are high. That's why Democrats ought to brace themselves for a blitz of below-the-belt ads in the dwindling days of this campaign.